Sleb Mastermind Show 2

Been a bit busy today what with one thing and another, so I didn’t have time to wiki any of tonight’s specialist subjects. Mind you, the only ones which I think would have really lent themselves well to the challenge – Prince and Shackleton – were my best rounds tonight anyway. Let’s get on with the show.

I was vaguely familiar with Professor Alice Roberts ,who was answering on the Moomin Novels of Tove Jansson. Now I did read a couple of these when I was in the primary school, but that was a good 40 years ago, and I’m afraid that I couldn’t remember enough to get more than 1 point – and that one was a lucky guess. Alice on the other hand put in a seemingly effortless 11 – a couple of wrong answers, but certainly a score which could be the springboard to a win, as we saw in last night’s show.

You might not be familiar with the name of actor Ewan Macintosh, but if you’re any sort of fan of The Office you’d recognize him as Keith Bishop. Ewan was answering on the strange TV show Twin Peaks Remember that one ? Well I never watched it, but even I knew that the murdered girl was called Laura Palmer, and the Kyle Maclachlan character was agent Dale Cooper. That accounted for my two points in the round. Once again, a praiseworthy double figure score was achieved, as Ewan scored 10.

I will admit that I was not previously familiar with the work of DJ Bobby Friction. Somehow I can’t imagine that this is something he’ll lose any sleep over. Bobby offered us the life and music of Prince. Now, I would never claim to be either a) particularly good on pop music, or b) a fan of the man himself, but the fact is that he made a significant body of work in the 80s, and I was able to get my highest specialist score of the night with him with 6 points. Bobby himself managed 8 , nothing to be ashamed of, but a score which left him with a lot to do in the GK round.

I’m not familiar with the work of comedian Simon Evans either, but I always have a bit of time for a gentleman who favours the wearing of the flat cap indoors. So I was hoping he’d do well on his chosen specialist subject of the Endurance expedition of Ernest Shackleton, Well, he did a lot better than I did. I was pleased enough to manage 4 points, which was precisely 1/3 of the total that Simon achieved. His score of 12, impressive for a 90 second round, is the highest SS score of the series so far.

There’s often some discussion about the relative easiness of the celebrity GK rounds. I don’t think that there’s any secret that they’re meant to be easier than the rounds in the regular series, or that the rounds are tailored to each sleb to give them their fair share of ‘gimmes’. I have no problem with this – after all, this is meant to be a bit of celebrity fun, where the participants get a chance to test themselves, and bring a little bit of money and a little bit of publicity to a chosen cause. It really isn’t about giving them a chance to humiliate themselves. I almost had a grand slam on the GK rounds tonight – I had clear rounds on Ewan’s, Alice’s and Simon’s rounds, but the question about Ke$ha in Bobby’s round did for me.

All of our slebs had GK scores in the teens tonight. Bobby Friction, answering on behalf of Cancer Research UK, managed 13 , which put him into the 20s. Ewan , representing the Steven Gerrard Foundation, had an absolutely disastrous start to his round, when he just couldn’t seem to get his head together on the first two or three questions, but after that hardly had another one wrong for the rest of the round. He added 15 points to take his overall score to 25. Enough to have a realistic chance of winning the show ? Probably not, I reckoned, based on the rather benign nature of the questions so far.

Alice, whose cause was For Ethiopia, couldn’t quite manage to overhaul it, though. This was probably because she wasted several seconds trying to dredge up from her memory that an angle of 90 degrees is a right angle. After all that she passed as well. She did recover, and in the end she added 13 to her total to come close, but 24 was not going to be enough.

It fell to Simon, representing Plan UK, to wrap up the proceedings then, with the best GK round of the night. It possibly wasn’t quite as good as Val McDermid’s from last night, but it was clearly the best of this show. He answered every question, 17 of them correctly , which took his total to 29, the joint highest of this series so far. Will it be beaten ? Well, I think that there’s room for one of the slebs to squeeze out at least another 2 points , but it’s a serious score off 210 seconds.

Details

Professor Alice Roberts	For Ethiopia	The Moomin novels of Tove Jansson	11 - 0	13 - 3	24 – 3
Ewan Macintosh	Steven Gerrard Foundation	Twin Peaks	10 - 3	15 - 1	25 – 4
Bobby Friction	Cancer Research UK	The Life and Music of Prince	8 - 1	13 - 2	21 – 3
Simon Evans	Plan UK	Shackleton and the Endurance Expedition	12 - 0	17 – 0	29 – 0